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Crobain writes "The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. 'This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.' The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release."

I am a very long time KDE user, and I expected 4.0 to be a great desktop, but it turned out to be a alpha so I kept using the old 3.x series.

The scope of 4.0 was quite big, so understood the problems and I hoped for 4.1 to be a stable release.

Reading the dot news on kde.org I found that the have gone back and rewritten a lot of plasma again. This means that it will need a new period of stabilization again.

I just hope that this time they don't release before it is ready. It would be a huge blow to the project's reputation. 3.5 is excellent, so we can keep using it until they are really ready with the new version. No hurry.

If you read also Aaron Seigo's blog, you'll see that this API change had been expected *way* before KDE 4.0 release. Libplasma is scheduled to go into kdelibs at some point (~ 4.2) so the API must be OK because then it'll be frozen. Besides, Plasma was reaborn from ashes (breakage wise) in just a week. This should tell something.

Yeah, and the system tray has been broken for well over a week now (possibly even two weeks) as a result, with no signs it'll be fixed any time soon. Apparently, the version of Plasma in the alpha is a snapshot from when it was even more broken; the trunk version is now finally more-or-less working again (though there have been several interesting additional breakages in it over the last week or two).

I am not sure even 4.1 will be a stable release. However, they have made massive improvements. Most of the KDE 4.1 ported applications look really nice (and, yeah, it's not all just eye-candy). Running KDE trunk (aka 4.1) today resulted (for me) in quite a few crashes (more than a week or so ago). Do these crashes worry me? Not really, because I send the core-dumps etc to the developers so they can reproduce them and write fixes.

I didn't know that 4.1 went alpha today, and (IMO) that seems a bit hasty...

If you have a few minutes, could you please take a look at my 3.5 desktop [imageshack.us] and check if it's possible to configure 4.x this way now? I'm using my desktop configuration for a few years now and I'm quite used to it, but last I checked it was impossible to get it on 4.0, especially the top panel.

Well, it's configured for a 12.1" laptop TFT (very high DPI, small size - that means very small physical pixels), so I guess it could look bad on a CRT, a low-DPI desktop LCD or one of those panoramic, glossy, high-contrast, low-DPI screens in those huge "laptops" one could use as a doorstop or a blunt weapon... But it sure looks good on a sublaptop, so no problem for me.

It looks weird because the red, green, and blue pixels are arranged differently. I guess I should have called it "subpixel rendering [wikipedia.org]" instead of "subpixel antialiasing". I just think it's interesting the effect subpixel rendering has on screenshots. Who would have guessed screenshots would one day have hardware compatibility issues?

(BTW, I'm using a Dell 2001FP LCD monitor. It's has a 20.1" size, a 1600x1200 resolution, a 4:3 aspect ration, and a matte finish.)

Because I don't want a Mac? I don't like the way OS X acts. I like the way it is laid out. Mind you, not the way it looks, the way it is laid out - that's a different thing. Ignore the icons, I've set them to OS X theme years ago and just didn't bother to change them, they're good enough. The widget theme is standard KDE, the window decorations are standard too. What is important to me is the placement of window buttons - they're much better on the left side of the window, as that's the side I'm generally f

Personally, I love that KDE gives users the freedom to configure their desktop to operate how they want it. People get upset when people create themes to have KDE look or operate like Windows or OS X, but why? Let them! That's what the freedom of choice means.

And personally I see the Windows themes get ripped the most by ass-hats, but if I can make KDE look just like Windows, then I can install it on boxes for people who largely only use a web browser, and they won't know the difference.

This is a big mistake and quite arrogant of the developers. The developers should never impose their belief on how a user should use the software. If people want to use the desktop as a file dump, then let them. A developer should NEVER force the user to do something like saving files to the desktop. So many people do this. All it will do is annoy the crap out of people. And if people don't like how it works, they won't use it. I see many instances of this type of behavior from developers writing busi

The developers should never impose their belief on how a user should use the software.

It's not that simple, the developers shouldn't support functionality that they don't believe adds value to the software. Of course whether users want to keep using the software after its had the features they like taken out is a different matter entirely.

Not all user actions are good, some can make it more difficult for the user in the long term. If is not the software's responsibility to prevent the user from acting i

There are actually good places to dump files -- like your home directory -- and kde4 makes that reasonably easy to get to.

And the show desktop button is ctrl+F12 by default, I think. It won't give you the actual background image, but it does turn the desktop into a "dashboard" -- which is pretty much exactly why it doesn't make sense to put files there anymore.

"We noticed that a lot of you users out there are using the Desktop in a way we don't approve of. So we took away your ability to do that."

Well, that's what happened with Pidgin...

In this case, I think it's more along the lines of, it's technically easier to turn the desktop into a desktop/dashboard widget thing, which is arguably very, very cool, if we don't also have to worry about putting files/folders there.

As my 16 year old son said of the jello-wobble screens: Cute, but what's the point!

and to think people said the same of Vista! Look how wrong they tur... oh yeah.

Seriously, Microsoft's main marketing effort in flogging copies of Vista, and persuading the world that Vista was the thing to have was entirely down to the UI. The fact that Vista hasn't had the expected take-up is partly down to it being a unhelpful resource hog and that too many bloggers said so. If Vista's UAC, Aero etc worked as we expected and there was just 2 editions, I think MS's recent results would have shown an incre

I have one of those "Vista Capable" laptops. What I just figured out the other day, is that if you switch to the "Windows Classic" theme, then the system actually runs quite smoothly. the dwm.exe process goes from about 90 MB to about 5 MB, and it runs just as quickly as XP did. For the most part anyway. I think that MS could have saved themselves a lot of bad press if they just would have told retailers to enable the classic theme by default on low end machines. Sure it wouldn't look pretty, but at lea

I'm not a kde user but I must say some of the things that I've seen about it would make me consider giving it another go. I quite like some of the ideas they've got, but I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this is part of the downside of open source. We've had the same thing with pidgin - in the e

Actually, there's more than two.XFCE definitely counts as a "desktop environment".If you expand that to include window managers, you'd add at least fluxbox, blackbox, openbox, windowmaker, ratpoison, and icewm.

I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this is part of the downside of open source. We've had the same thing with pidgin - in the end perhaps we could all just get along?

Please no. Let's foster competition. Especially in the case of Pigdin. This is how developers route around damage. This is Ope

Examples like Pidgin fork maybe working as intended but I still can't stop thinking that there's a lot of waste of good will and efforts in the Open Source community, which in the ends bites back and generate products which quality could be better.

What is the difference between a "Desktop Environment" and a "Desktop Shell"?I used to use KDE. At one point I discovered that I could replace "startkde" with "kicker & kdewin" for drastically shorter startup times and I noticed no difference in functionality whatsoever.

I then went to e16 and then to e17. What are these "Desktop Shells" lacking that a "Desktop Environment" provides? True, e17 does not have a system tray, but there are plans to add one, and I currently use a standalone tray.

If you combine the developers working on GNOME and KDE you won't end up with one project that's twice as productive. In fact, it will be very unproductive because each set of developers have vastly different vision.

Two parallel projects keep each other motivated to become the best one. It also creates playground to implement new features. Sometimes GNOME might not like an idea because it's to controversial. When the developer can implement

I am using KDE 4.0, yeah its rough, yeah some basic functionality isn't there. And I think it is a poor setup not to be able to do things like drag and drop and make things smaller than default. Everything can be made larger, but never smaller.

However, despite all the failures, which I believe will come around, KDE is really moving to the next step and once the polish is applied it will outshine the rest. A desktop were apps of every shape and color can be integrated. Where the best ideas don't have to be accepted by the head developers, customization, and opening the doors to open source even further. It is a place were truly original ways to organize data and display information will come. It is were we will begin to move beyond just making a windows 3.1 gui more fancy and with more features. I think these are worthy goals. I put up with the annoyances now because I want to be part of it. I think it will be big.

But seriously, developers, start getting functionality working. You have to get people to use it. The widgets will come but you need functionality to get people to use it. No drag and drop for icons on the desktop, can't move around widgets in the bottom bar, right clicking doesn't give you widget specific options. And when they do, it is very limited, like the digitial clock being set to 12 hour time. I know these aren't sexy to work on, but nothing else matters if this isn't done.

Lastly, what I think will make the biggest appeal is making kde install easy on vista. People hate the vista interface, but have to have it for the new stuff underneath like directx 10. If you can make kde4 stable and install smooth on vista, you will have a firefox style pickup of it.

"And I think it is a poor setup not to be able to do things like drag and drop and make things smaller than default. Everything can be made larger, but never smaller."That's why I switched back to 3.5. Big effing stupid everything will be fine when I'm old(er) and blind, but I can see ATM and teh largeness is annoying. That's also why I don't use Gnome.

As a user, I want a VERY easy to configure desktop I don't have to spend time fvcking with. and don't care if it looks old-fashioned to some people.

Yesterday I installed KDE 4.0 on my corporate laptop!!! Next to Windows, without touching the partitions! All thanks to a small program called wubi and which makes it possible to install Kubuntu and the others _inside_ Windows partitions.
So far I have less than four hours of experience with KDE 4.0, but have only found minor details to complain about - like some menus don't get their contrasting font color if you switch to a dark colored widget style.
As Debian user I cannot say that Ubuntu is _easier_ t

You are apparently involved with KDE, so maybe you can help me understand: what is plasma? I have read a lot of "vision", I have seen a few toys applets, but I cannot seem to get a feel for what is really is and what it will mean.

I don't think having puzzle toys and the weather channel on my desktop is a great revolution, so I must be missing something. But what?

The biggest point is probably containment switching and customizing. Containments are the "containers" for applets, or plasmoids, and the idea is that you create them according to your needs (activity-based) and then switch among them on the fly. It's different from X11 virtual desktop switching because (in theory) each containment could be totally different. You'd switch between them by zooming in and out (Zooming User Interface - ZUI).
Implementation of this is already under way in current SVN.

Here is a related (p)review of latest revision of KDe 4.1 (not the exact alpha just released): http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-4-rev-802150-work-in-progress/ [polishlinux.org]
"Plasma has gone under major API changes and is still a bit wonky, Dolphin gets tabs (hell yeah!), Phonon gets a Gstreamer backend, KWin gets wobbly windows (hell yeah!), and KInfoCenter and K3b get KDE4 ports. KDE 4.1 will be sure to blow your mind."
A bit more comprehensive and screenshot-rich than the ArsTechnica article.

I mean, look at this [arstechnica.com]. Are they purposefully trying to waste as much screen real estate as possible? It looks like they deliberately put 50 pixels of even more no-quite-brushed-metal-looking empty space around each little button there.

I recently upgraded to Kubuntu Hardy. After much agonizing, I eventually decided reluctantly to stick with KDE3.5 - for me it's just not ready yet in Kubuntu. But since Intrepid Ibex will include KDE4.1, I'll be very glad to switch to that.
KDE4 is brilliant - just not yet.

>> Why such vast tracts of grey?Partially due to incomplete dialog design on the snapshot they are testing. This isn't released software. Also it depends on what you're comparing it to. Mac UI also has a lot of empty space, mostly because of the icon+text toolbars.

>> Why the faded titles in the panel? What are they intended to signify?

I don't see this anywhere in the link you gave. I think in the ars screenshot, it's just a bug in the theme.

You mean in the title bar of the apps? I guess so, but I don't see how that will confuse anyone. By the time you have the application open you will know what it is.I guess it would be ok if it was named something like KDE File Manager, but then people get pissed about everything being KDE Something, just like the pseudo standard of kname was ridiculed for so long.

If you just name it "File manager" or "Archive manager" then you can't keep different apps apart. Sure most people should only have one of each

How about having the title show *only the name of the file it is working on*. This should include the full path name. That I would like to see. There is no reason to show which program: the user either does not care, or can easily figure it out by the name of the file, or can open the window and look at it to figure this out.It used to be that windows were titled this way. Whatever happened? This is not just Linux, but Windows and OSX as well. OSX is worse, the "dock" *only* shows the program, as though whi

Also, what is the deal with basic OS programs being referred to by their name? Dolphin? Why not just call it 'file browser'? This is really confusing and overwhelming for new users.

A default OS X setup presents the user with unintuitive names like "Finder" and "Safari". But nobody complains about that.

Why? Possibly because it actually isn't a big deal. It only takes a few minutes to learn that "Safari" is the web browser, or that "Excel" deals with big tables, or that "Dolphin" is a file browser. Humans

I don't really care what the KDE developers state, but the way they have gone about releasing and hyping KDE 4.x.x is stupid. They built and built and built the hype for the 4.0 milestone, even though they were screaming it wasn't perfect. But the hype outshone the voices of caution. Now everyone was waiting for some stability in 4.1, and we're not going to get it then either, again, after hyping 4.1 will be usable. By the time the 4.x version is usable no one will give a crap about it. I, personally,

Exactly the same thing with the Ubuntu release. All hype. And then a release comes and it's (knowingly) buggy as hell.Doesn't shipping with a beta web browser that is known to be broken and extremely unstable enough evidence? I can't even print in their version of Firefox 3 without the browser crashing.

Wireless support (especially in laptops) is (yet again) a nightmare. No progress really has been made. Wext is insufficient in many cases. Ndiswrapper doesn't work a lot of the time. Gnome or KDE netwo

So you gazed into your crystal ball and figured out that 4.1 will not be stable? Since it hasn't been released that's quite the accomplishment. I use a snapshot of 4.1 at work, and I haven't seen it crash in weeks.

I see that it's now resizeable, but that doesn't fix the basic problem of it hiding all the contextual information about where you are in the menu structure and being useless for people who rely on spacial memory.

I like KDE better than I like Gnome (due to KIOSlave/KParts being available in all URL/file prompts, etc).I really miss using "ggl:blah" in my run dialog.However, two things have been keeping me with Gnome lately:

KDE applications start slowly.

Ubuntu is much more mature than Kubuntu.

The second is inevitable, I guess, and is being worked on, so there's less to complain about.

But the first really annoys me - launching one of the smallest KDE applications I could find (kate) as a benchmark of app startup time s

There is always time taken in loading the supporting libraries, which really only affects the starting time of the first app that uses them. For subsequent apps that also use them, they're already loaded. Have you ever tried to start gedit while running a KDE desktop? It might give a similar result.

KDE 4.0 was pre-alpha. I mean it was bad. It was almost criminally bad. Significant rebuke has been placed on the KDE team. Such a horrible release that even now is still quite bad even with the updates.

KDE 4.1, hopefully will be much better. We'll see.

KDE 4.x has the potential to change the landscape of desktop managers in Linux but if these guys can't get it worked out and faster than say 5 years, it will seriously disappoint.

So I've been using Ubuntu 7.x on my Toshiba laptop for the last several months, and found it pretty easy, albeit with certain caveats (getting wireless to work was a pain, as was graphics - ATI chipset) I'd tried KDE quite some time ago, and was interested in trying it again. So I downloaded and installed the KDE4 Remix for AMD64 machines. Looked fine at first, but then came those damn wireless issues again. I downloaded, built and installed ndiswrapper, grabbed the latest XP drivers (Atheros AR5007EG c

Constantly trying to reinvent a perfectly round wheel results ina) New problems that need to be worked out from scratchb) Totally different use patterns which may or may not work in the real worldc) Reluctant users

Personally, I don't see a problem with following patterns that were created for Windows. There's no reason that the existing desktop format can't be extended and have features added to it if need be. This "lets go a totally different direction just coz we don't want to follow MS" is stupid. MS spent huge amounts of R&D finding out what regular users will be able to use, and freeriding on that seems like a good idea to me.

Also, open source software doesn't have a good track record when it comes to ground up usability designs. Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts. Then look at how long Linux has taken to get to a point where it's considered barely usable by the every day user.

Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.

Also, open source software doesn't have a good track record when it comes to ground up usability designs. Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts. Then look at how long Linux has taken to get to a point where it's considered barely usable by the every day user.

Your comment is a bit silly, to say the least. After all, in order to try to prove that all F/LOSS is somehow inferior to all commercial software, you picked up the GIMP and Pidgin, which are two of the most god-awful U

Get off your knee0jerk horse. I love FLOSS, however if you think that it has up until now a good track record with user friendliness then you're fooling yourself. It's getting better, mainly because FLOSS devs are realising that they have sucked in this area up until now and have endeavoured to improve. Head in sand attitudes are not helping.KDE and Gnome have not been ahead of Windows despite having quite a few neat tricks up their sleeves. If you take a brutally honest look, the fundamentals are still eas

I agree. I like that KDE is there, and I like that other people like it, and I know that a lot of people hate Gnome.Me? I simply don't get KDE.

To me, it looks messy, cluttered and slightly juvenile.

That is coming from someone who migrated to Tux around about the time XP was released (meaning I was a bonafide 2K user). The person that helped me switch told me that I should use KDE because "it is most like Windows".

That lasted about 6 months until I discovered Gnome. I much prefer the clean lines of Gnome.

I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux, spending 95% of my time in the former (MS Visual Studio and my own novel writing software), and 5% in the latter. What I'd really, really like is a way to make the KDE or Gnome desktop font as similar to Windows XP as possible.

I've searched the web and found a few solutions, but I don't want a theme which adds a Windows start button to KDE, and I don't care about the system tray. It's the desktop font - resolution, type face and size - which I find really distracting

Sorry but that's a very valid point and you're just an arrogant troll.
Many developers are blindfolded enough to think their views fit better what the users want than years and a bunchload of dollars invested in R&D, then invest their time in re-inventing the same thing again, with maybe a slight difference no one really cares about (or that makes a feature totally missing the point).
Just look at the current Pidgin controversy for a good illustration of the parent's opinion. It's in yesterday's/. ne

My biggest beef with KDE4 is typified in your post. It is littered with promises of what is to come without delivering any of it to make a usable desktop. They are working on toys ignoring core functionality. This *IS* the release of 4.1 the long promised "it is scheduled for 4.1" the KDE devs kept posting to every bitch to the last release. This release is still crap IMO. More, I'll wrap up all their problems with it in one word...PLASMA! That POS is being forced down users throats and any attempt to add f

No, it's threatening anticipated and oft-used canned responses that are either deliberately misleading or plain stupid. It's not censorship, they can still make the point if they like, I'm just pre-emptively pointing out how stupid the reply I know some people will give is.

You don't think that even MS knows that MSPaint is a totally invisible app that nobody but the most idiotic user would use? There are piles of free alternatives. Also, were MS to add anything else to MSPaint we'd get Adobe and the open source community calling antitrust and unfair competition due to bundling. MS won't without good reason include anything other than a trivially functional app in Windows, and graphics tools is something MS will gladly stay out of.

It's not really as bad as the ars screenshot would have you believe. For instance, look at this one [wikimedia.org] instead. And remember how easy it is to apply themes to any linux desktop - there are some really slick themes out there.

But your point is still valid. The one thing I've never been able to get to grips with about the linux desktops are the fonts. Unfortunately between MS, Apple, Adobe all the font rendering IP is locked up pretty tight so it doesn't look like we're gonna get better fonts on the Linux deskt

Yeah, every time I do my yearly let's give Linux another chance the first thing that jumps out at me are the awful font rendering.

I'll grant you, the default settings do truly suck. FreeType auto-hinting is hideous. This was a big sticking point for me as well.

However, it does only take a few minutes to change the configuration to something that looks just as good as OS X. Clearly there are other things putting you off Linux, which is fine (it isn't the right choice for everyone), but next time you give i

Basically, the Oxygen artists insisted that having the default window decoration obey the user's color settings for the window frame (which solve the problem of active/inactive distinction) was just too ugly to bear. Never mind that the first question everybody else had when looking at a KDE4 desktop was "how do I tell which window is on top?" The first response was "you're supposed to have composite support, then the

>neooffice sucks balls
Good thing the Aqua port of the selfsame free office suite is now in beta, and NeoOffice will soon be history.

This is welcome news.

I don't like OO.o too much, though I guess it is the best open office (heh) suite. NeoOffice, however, takes all the bad sides of OO.o and adds total lack of integration on Macs, including the keyboard shortcuts for Home, End, PgUp and PgDn.

What I want is a simple, modular office suite with good desktop integration.
But I'll be quite satisfied with better integration alone.

After running Kubuntu 8.04 Remix for 2 days I recognised a lot of what you just said and reverted back to the KDE 3.5 desktop which is stable, highly configurable (and pleasantly familiar).
I sure hope the developers will not go the Gnome way of locking everything up!
But right now KDE4 is a system in it's infancy and we have to give the guys some time to develop this impressive new model.

Maybe enough of us kde3 lovers will remain to start a project to put the kd3 interface on the kde4 internals. I love kde and use it on all my computers, but kde4 seems the wrong way to go. And the developers don't seem to interested in the opinions of long-time users.

>> My favourite apps are all Linux; digikam, amarok, k3b but non-kde 4 versions of these are a dead end now.

What are you talking about? Amarok 1.4.9 was released very recently, Digikam is still getting a release for KDE3, and k3b works just fine. None of those apps are released for KDE4 yet. The premier versions are still KDE3 apps.

When the KDE4 versions are released, you can run them in your KDE3 desktop with no problems. I don't see what you're complaining about.

There are only a handful of things that really bug me on KDE4 (4.0), but this is one of them. akregator from 3.5x seems to work okay under KDE4 (other than the "launcher" complaining that it can't find akregator...after it successfully starts it), but kmail's IMAP support appears to be broken when run on kde4.
Give me kmail and akregator (hopefully with enclosure support now), real metadata in dolphin, ability to revert to KDE3's "sort by date" algorithm, and LET ME PROPERLY RESIZE AND POSITION THE FRIGGI

Ports are being developed and currently reside in the area51 repository. Subscribe to the kde-freebsd@kde.org mailing list to follow progress. Currently, the biggest show-stopper is the co-existence of KDE3 and KDE4 on the same system, along with QT3x and QT4x libs in ${LOCALBASE}. I prefer to continue to use 3.5.8 (although arts is broken on 7.0-R for certain configurations of hardware, but arts is well known for being a PoS anyway) until 4.x is stable.